Kenneth Kidd, whose chapter from Freud in Oz (2011) is one of the sharpest analyses of Sendak, also codifies his notion of childhood in contrast with his assessment of Sendak’s. In an essay on allegory in Sendak, Geraldine DeLuca considers In the Night Kitchen (1970) “true to a child’s experience” but Outside Over There (1981) unsuitable for children because “we – particularly children – are left at the end of this work with too much pain” (14, 22). “There are good reasons why we do not start out stories with descriptions of widows who have lost all their children but one or end them with images of mother and daughter lying down and dying,” she writes, and then partially disavows this criticism in her next sentence: “This is not to say that children should be shielded from descriptions of material hardships and death, only that they are not necessarily better off when entertained with stories that reflect or take as their point of departure the social and cultural realities of an age other than their own” (220). One of our foremost scholars of fairy tales (the darkest genre within children’s literature, and a genre originally not for children at all), Tatar herself wonders whether Dear Mili (1988) – Sendak’s version of a Wilhelm Grimm tale – is suitable for children.

Yet, as Maria Tatar points out, Bettelheim shares Sendak’s view that reading stories about childhood anxieties can be potentially therapeutic, a way for children to (in Sendak’s words) tame wild things through fantasy. The combination is the worst desertion that can threaten a child” (48). To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion. In his infamous 1969 Ladies Home Journal piece, Bruno Bettelheim – who had not then read Where the Wild Things Are (1963) – worried about the book’s effect on “the child.” As he said, “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion. Or What sort of child does the Sendak book expect as its reader? Or, even, What is a child? The Sendak book that got us adults asking these questions is Where the Wild Things Are, published 50 years ago, in October 1963. Will a Sendak book make children uncomfortable, too? they wonder.

Maurice Sendak’s work makes adults uncomfortable, and these adults then consequently worry about how children will feel. After some research, we figured out that its release was in October of that year.

It’s 50 years old, having been originally released in Fall 1963. My fellow Niblings ( Betsy Bird, Julie Walker Danielson, Travis Jonker) and I decided a few months ago that it’d be fun to coordinate some blog posts today in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Where the Wild Things Are.

Where the wild things are 1963